Pierce

Pierce Brosnan, Toronto, Sept. 15, 2005

PIERCE BROSNAN WAS ALREADY AN EX-BOND WHEN I PHOTOGRAPHED HIM, joining Connery, Moore, Lazenby and Dalton in rather select ranks. Daniel Craig's debut as Bond in Casino Royale would be announced a month after I took these photos, so for all intents and purposes Brosnan was still James Bond in the eyes of the public.

He was already moving past the role with films like Matador, the movie he was promoting at the film festival where I shot him - a comedy thriller where Brosnan plays a dodgy hit man past his prime. Wisely, Brosnan had decided to use his undersung talent for comedy to subvert the Bond typecasting. It would end up working, giving his career the reboot that neither Roger Moore nor Timothy Dalton were able to manage.

I photographed Brosnan on the courtyard patio at the Hotel Intercontinental on Bloor - the major festival press venue at the time. He had just finished doing an interview with Xtra!, the city's biweekly gay magazine, when he sat down at our table. Chris, the writer, asked him how it had gone.

"Oh, you know, cocks, cocks, cocks! Ass, ass ass!" Brosnan said ruefully.

Pierce Brosnan, Toronto, Sept. 15, 2005

This set the tone for the interview and photo shoot that followed, as Brosnan smirked and wise-cracked his way through the afternoon, with no intention whatsoever of treating a round of festival press with any of the dignity it probably didn't deserve.

Brosnan had no interest in smoldering or looking dashing for my camera, so the shoot was a distracted one, as my subject chatted with Chris and the publicist while I worked, or idly scanned the other tables in the restaurant, occasionally looking toward my lens but never focusing on it. I don't resent him for it; his priority at that point in his career was to leave James Bond behind, so he didn't want to give the press any more suave headshots that would echo the hundreds he'd posed for since Remington Steele.

The Intercontinental courtyard was an unforgiving setting for portrait shoots, between the clutter of chairs and tables and potted plants, and the indifferent light at the bottom of four tall hotel walls. Overcoming it required roughly equal effort from both the photographer and the subject, but that didn't happen here, and so I ended up with what amounts to little more than a set of overworked snapshots.